What causes the reduction in traffic?

[cardif]

On FEB 2012 I got the now-famous notice from Google about the unnatural links.  I contacted the SEO company who worked for my website and removed the inbound links. I submitted the reconsideration request and Google said that there are still unnatural links. I dig more on my links and continue to remove the links I think Google does not like. I again submitted the reconsideration request and they responded “we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines.”.

When I compared the non-paid traffic month by month, starting on March, I see these fluctuations:

March compared with Feb -16%

April compared with March -18%

May compared with April +13%

Jun compared with May -10%

July compared with June +10%

August compared with July -10%

September compared with August -12%

October compared with September-29%

Also, If I look into the index stats on my WMT, I see that on October I have 50% less pages indexed compared with July. It has been dropping between 10% and 15% each week, as follows:

|

Date

|

Total indexed

|

Change

7/1/2012

|

1101

|

-0.09%

7/8/2012

|

1020

|

-0.07%

7/15/2012

|

1020

|

0%

7/22/2012

|

975

|

-0.04%

7/29/2012

|

781

|

-0.2%

8/5/2012

|

714

|

-0.09%

8/12/2012

|

703

|

-0.02%

8/19/2012

|

690

|

-0.02%

8/26/2012

|

690

|

0%

9/2/2012

|

588

|

-0.15%

9/9/2012

|

582

|

-0.01%

9/16/2012

|

580

|

0%

9/23/2012

|

580

|

0%

9/30/2012

|

580

|

0%

10/7/2012

|

622

|

0.07%

10/14/2012

|

618

|

-0.01%

10/21/2012

|

618

|

0%

10/28/2012

|

562

|

-0.09%

|

The rankings for the 3 top keywords went (starting on April)

From     5              to            15

From     8              to            27

From     5              to            39

At this point, I am not sure what causes the reduction in traffic.

[SixTwoInteractive]

Google has sent you a notice telling you why. It does not like the link profile of this website. The way I see it you have 3 options:

clean-up the link profile

ignore it, add new content, and hope for the best

start a new site.

[josh-riley]

True. And, less links means less traffic options for people to find our site. As you remove links, are your looking at white hat ways to replace that lost visibility?

[edwardrj]

Have you tried using the new disavow tool? I'm hearing mixed reviews, but it was designed for folks like you, and you might as well give it a shot after you've tried to remove as many of the links as possible.

[SixTwoInteractive]

Yep... as you pull those links down the site may drop more. Negative link velocity is no good.

[SixTwoInteractive]

You could give it a whirl. What do you have to lose?

[cardif]

Hello Jason,

thank you for your answer.

I finished analizing the qualitiy of my link profile, based on this great article http://www.seomoz.org/blog/anchor-text-distribution-avoiding-over-optimization, and I see that, not only I have a Targeted 71.16% vs Non Targeted 28.84% distribution, but the Exact Match anchor text represents the 66.51% of the targeted links, having a Variance from Normal of 48.46%.

The new question is: should I reduce the targeted anchor text percentage by removing some targeted links or better add new links for non targeted anchor texts?

[cardif]

I am working on that. What am not sure if I should take in consideration the links published on WMT or from Open Site Explorer?

[cardif]

Do you know if I have to consider the inbound links from OSE or WMT?